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Reviewed by:
  • Backwoods Consumers & Homespun Capitalists
  • Marjorie Griffin Cohen (bio)
Béatrice Craig. Backwoods Consumers & Homespun Capitalists. University of Toronto Press. 2009. viii, 350. $75.00

This book is about the early history of the Madawaska Territory, an area along the banks of the Upper Saint John River that encompassed both the United States and Canada. While it is geographically a backcountry [End Page 691] settlement, the author shows that it was not isolated but connected to the wider world through trade and personal connections. The wealth of information in this book about various aspects of life and commerce is impressive and clearly derives from the author’s many years working on the history of the region. Her first published piece on the area, of the twenty-two of her own pieces cited in this book, occurred in the early 1980s. There is no doubt that she is the authority on the history of the region.

The main point of the book is to show that the area was always involved in some way with the market, either through the staples trade, through some household production, or through consumption of both capital and consumer goods. The primary evidence used is from various data sets from parish registers, real estate transactions, the censuses, tithing records, and various other government reports. The amount of work involved in mining these varied and often incomplete records is enormous, and the author’s diligence in this is obvious.

The author won the Canadian History Association Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for this book, and because of that recognition of her work, it is fair to take her intentions, as stated in the introduction, seriously. And in this, I found the book disappointing. The introduction challenges the staple thesis and says a new conceptual framework is needed ‘to replace the staple thesis.’ This she feels can be done by a greater examination of local markets. This is something that has been the subject for economic historians in Canada since Vernon Folke first wrote about the myth of the self-sufficient pioneer in 1962. Craig also wants to challenge what belongs to the economic sphere – specifically the notion that productive work was in the public sphere and what happened within households is ignored as economic activity. This characterization of the state of research on rural economies needs to be updated. A great deal of work has occurred on this (which the author acknowledges, incidentally), although surprisingly, she seems unfamiliar with most of it. That which she does cite (mine for instance) is mischaracterized. But for the most part, the methods used to examine the contributions of women to a rural economy are simply not used here, so we have the normal dichotomy of men as the farmers and women taking care of the household with occasional garden or textile work. Nowhere does she assume that women are farmers too and that the farm household had a labour construction that might be more complex than usually assumed and, as a result, merited attention. The one examination of women’s connection to markets is their work with textiles, but even as consumers, the treatment of women is surprisingly thin. Consumption itself is usually a form of work for women, and that certainly would have been the case in an early farm household.

The sense, in reading the introduction, is that she has set up a series of straw dogs that are easily disproven. In part the structure of the book [End Page 692] prevents a clear understanding of the development of markets and the shift, ultimately, to a market economy. Each chapter in the book is on a distinct theme and covers over a century of time (principle men, lumbering, sawmills, general stores, farming, textiles, consumption). However, when studying markets and their development, time periods matter a great deal. So a focus on just about everything discussed in the book changed a lot, but there is no sustained analysis of how this occurred and what it meant for shifting from ‘markets’ to a market economy. There is no sense at all for what change meant at the household level or at any point how much time was devoted to...

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